Gaming: Space Combat #2

Looking back on yesterday’s post, I realise that there are a lot of easier ways for me to do this, or variations about how to this.

Astromachia, if I remember correctly, had a set-up where you were a 1x1x1 cube at height 5. [Max height 10, min 0 – the game used a lot of 10-sided dice] Your ship was divided up into 6 parts – fore & aft, port & starboard, top & bottom, and each was equipped with the weapon, or weapons of your choosing. But as you were both the same size (it was a 1v1 game), if I could hit you with my fore and port guns, you could hit me with your aft and starboard guns also. I also meant that if I was directly below you, I could only hit you with my topside batteries. However, if I then moved one space left, and one space backwards, then I could broadside you with port, fore and topside weapons.

Damage was quite novel too – for say, my aft side, I would have a list of 30 or so little white circles, some of which are allocated to engines, some to weapons. If you hit that side with a Type 6 weapon, and rolled a 3 on the d6 (6sided die), then I could shade out the 3rd circle along, and every 6th one after that, but the damage for some weapons had a “fall-off” point, as such. Therefore two shots Type 2 weapon with a 5 damage falloff might destroy everything allocated in the first 10 hardpoints (technical name for the circles – think of it as HP), but if I had 100 such hardpoints (clearly hull tanking here) two shots from a Type 8 weapon might do more damage overall. If 75% of a system’s hardpoints had gone, then if was off-line. You could though repair several hardpoints a turn, so you had the option of fully restoring one system, or just managing to bring 5 more online. If the total HP for any section dropped below around 80%, then you lost, so you had to always bring your strongest side to bear on the enemy, and target his weakest. Pretty good, all things considered.

Eve Online had a novel field approach – you had a cloud of small “nanites” that moved automatically to absorb the damage from an attack – dissipating a laser beam, or blocking a kinetic round, and you repaired or produced a set number of these per second. It’s a nice way to explain this kind of stuff without resorting to force-field technology.